Greylock Startup Presentation: Saam Motamedi Strategies
- Greylock Partners investor Saam Motamedi has a 14-slide deck to show founders how to impress him.
- The presentation goes over what startups should know about market, product, and building traction.
- If a firm has a clear, compelling plan for each element, it’s a great sign it could succeed, he said.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Greylock partner Saam Motamedi wants to help founders impress him, so he created a presentation to show them exactly what he wants to see in a pitch.
The enterprise technology investor writes checks for early-stage startups and noticed that many companies that approached him focused on parading out targets like how much money they expected to reel in that year (a metric known as annual recurring revenue or ARR) instead of a bigger-picture vision.
“We commonly get asked what we look for in a seed or Series A company,” he told Insider. “Entrepreneurs will ask, ‘Hey is there some ARR milestone or customer milestone you’re looking at?’ And the reality is: We’re not. We’re not actually looking for any of those things.”
To help explain to founders exactly what he and Greylock are looking for — and how startups should go about showing it — he put together a presentation that walks through a startup’s roadmap.
“The key is putting the foundation in place for building a market-defining company, and thinking through different dimensions of market, product, and getting the initial customers,” he said.
If a startup founder can show that they have a clear, compelling plan for each of these elements, there’s a good chance he and Greylock will be interested, according to Motamedi, who has invested in Abnormal Security and Apiiro.
“We’re able to write these larger, early-stage investments very early on if there’s clarity around these pieces,” he said.
